


Without You

by The_Lionheart



Series: One Sword [6]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Mental Health Issues, Original Character Death(s), Past Character Death, Songfic, Trans Female Character, Trans Fiddleford H. McGucket, Trans Male Character, Trans Mrs. McGucket, True Love, come join me in the having feelings about the mcgucket marriage and fidds and mrs fidds club, featured: me crying about fictional characters and listening to harry nilsson, small references to trans Stan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-07 06:57:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10354677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lionheart/pseuds/The_Lionheart
Summary: No, I can't forget tomorrowWhen I think of all my sorrow,When I had you there but then I let you go.And now it's only fair that I should let you knowWhat you should know.~Harry Nilsson, "Without You"





	

Love is a lot of things and takes a lot of forms; for the two of them, across the multiverse, in every world where they meet, it always begins the same way.

A five year old child in blue denim and a five year old child in pink linen, wrist-deep in a sandbox, smiling wordlessly at one another as they build kingdoms with their bare hands.

It's a small farming town; there is a public school that neither of them attends, and there is a very small private school that costs more than either of their parents can afford run by the nuns who live next to the church their families visit every Sunday. It's a small enough school that they never see the insides of another between kindergarten and senior year. They are in every class together for thirteen years; they go to the same college afterward, the first members of their respective families to do so. No one is surprised when they marry at eighteen before leaving; their letters and calls become more and more infrequent and they visit rarely, then never. Much is made of the fact that they do not change their surnames; so untraditional, their families gossip. Their hometown and their families lose track of them. They both think it's better this way. Perhaps it is.

Love is expressed differently by every person and in every dimension; the two of them, across the multiverse, are constant.

He orbits her like a planet caught in her radiance; her heart flutters and soars every time they touch and speak, kiss and smile.

Neither of them is afraid of the other's reaction. He asks her to call him Fiddleford from now on. She asks him to call her Amanda. Their love is banjo music serenading her while she studies, a steady grounding hand when he starts to lose himself, a thousand casual touches and thoughtful gestures, a hundred thousand displays of caring and affection. Their love is walking the campus hand in hand, a small secret smile shared between them, stars in her eyes when she talks about his talent and his heart, stars in his eyes when he talks about her mind and her passion. Their love is curled into one another, watching Star Trek and tinkering and reading medical journals. They think each other, and their love, to be perfect. Perhaps it is. Perhaps they are.

They make friends with their classmates and colleagues, as is to be expected.

("I could've gotten into West Coast Tech," Ford slurs, reeking of the cheap beer they can smuggle on-campus, leaning heavily against him. "I wassshh sabotaged by my twin brother, Stan."

"Your parents named ya Stanford and Stanley?" he asks, bemused and more than a little buzzed himself.

"Nah," Ford says, eyes focusing in the middle distance. "My- Stan was like, uh, like you and Mandy. _He_ picked Stanley."

He would have liked to meet this brother, would have liked to have known somebody else like him, would have liked to have had a friend who'd been through some of the same things he had-

-too much bad blood there, though. Anyone could see it would take a miracle to get Ford Pines to forgive that brother of his.)

These are the things he will forget:

  1. Her name. Later, much later, he'll get _Amanda_ back, but not Amanda Rivera, not Nurse Rivera, not the feel of her name on his tongue as they made love, not the bite of her name against his teeth as they argued. He will eventually relearn _Amanda_ and there will be too much that was theirs and theirs alone, too much that he was the sole guardian of.
  2. The color of her hair and skin and eyes. He'll look at his adult son and see too much of himself to know for sure, the blue of his own eyes, pinks and peaches in cheeks and hands too light to be hers, dark hair that strikes gold in the right light. It's beautiful- his son is beautiful, will always be- but it's not _her_. One day he'll move into a mansion and stop in a room paneled floor to ceiling with Brazilian cherry stained dark and polished to a high shine, and his hands will flutter before him, searching fruitlessly for the feel of her hair. He'll sit down at the desk of a man who tried to sell the world and the glossy walnut surface will be so familiar that his body aches. He won't know why he cries himself to sleep that night, only that he misses her, that he misses everything he can remember and everything he can't. He never willingly steps foot into Preston Northwest's old office again.
  3. What it was she ever saw in him worth loving. He never loses how he felt about her, and he never loses the devastation when he realized he'd lost her, and he tries too hard but never manages to forget the hollow despair of her death, of knowing he'd ruined things and they would stay ruined, forever and always. He never loses the shame that curls like a rabid dog in his gut at who he's been and what he's done and the myriad swarm of ways that he'd failed her and failed his son and failed himself. He never gets back her smile; her hand in his when they graduated high school and then college together, her pride bursting like a flash of sunlight when he earned his Masters degree, her soothing voice rescuing him from himself. He never gets back the feel of his arms around her, his mouth against her neck, the fire that flared in both of them. He never gets back the feeling of being one person in two bodies, of having a kindred spirit so utterly alike that the only differences they ever noticed were the ways they fixed each other. He never gets back the memory of countless evenings at her side, one hand on her back as she washed her hands, brushed her teeth, scrubbed her face, washed her hands, brushed her teeth, scrubbed her face, washed her hands, brushed her teeth, scrubbed her face, stopping her before her skin broke raw and bleeding, massaging moisturizer into her fingers and palms and kissing her forehead and not trying to hide or excuse the frustrated tears running down her cheeks. He never gets back the warmth of her body against his back, arms cradling him in place to stop him from getting back up and pacing the room, lacing her fingers with his to stop him from pulling his hair out, one strand at a time. He only ever remembers that he was a burden and that she was wonderful.
  4. How she dies. Tate never really understood it, and so he can't explain it now, two decades on. He knew it once, he's positive, but there's nothing but a sucking hole of goneness when he tries to remember, and maybe- maybe that's better. Maybe he didn't need that then. Maybe he doesn't need it now. 



**This is the beginning of the end.**

The three of them in bed together, a silent, pudgy toddler sleeping between their bodies, their hands linked and resting on the chub of his perfect little baby belly.

"It's a good opportunity," he tells her, chin propped up on one hand. "Stanford Pines was always a good guy, too."

"And it's only for four months," she adds, rubbing her thumb against his. "It's going to be tough for Tate without his Daddy, but you'll be home before Halloween."

He hesitates. He knows it's the right thing to do- they need the money, and his work on miniaturization really needs the type of equipment Ford's work and Ford's money can get him, and he has enough proof of concept to know that he can make something the size of a standard briefcase a hundred times more powerful than the old IBM's that filled entire rooms at Backupsmore. Something hot and sour crawls up the back of his throat at the thought of leaving his family in Palo Alto, of setting foot in the secluded little hamlet where his old classmate- where his old friend has set up shop.

And if she told him to stay he would stay, and the portal would never be built, Six-Fingers burning himself out without a whisper.

That won't do.

Something immensely cold and calculating reaches out with its finger and writes the words against her brain, overriding every part of her that needs Spectacles here.

"I don't want to leave you," he says softly. She reaches over, running a hand over a pajama-clad hip, up his bare side. Her glossy nails trail across the edges of his ribs, the pad of her thumb ghosting over one of the barely-faded scars on his chest, her palm gliding over his collarbone and resting snugly against the side of his neck, her fingertips carding a little through his loose, dirty-blond hair.

"I'll be waiting for you, sweetheart," she says, her forehead against his.

When he calls in September and tells her that it's going to be a little more time up here than he thought originally, but surely he'll be home by Thanksgiving, she tells him again, "I'll be waiting for you, sweetheart."

When he calls in November and apologizes for not being able to make the trip down for Thanksgiving but he and Ford are so close, they're going to have their first true test of their device's function within eight weeks and it's awful honey but at least Tate's too little to remember that he won't be home this Christmas and he'll make it up to her with the funding this experiment brings in, he promises, she hesitates a little, killing the urge to plead with him to come home, to tell him that she's worried, to tell him that Tate had a nightmare that a big eye ate Daddy, but in the end she forces a small smile and tells him again, "I'll be waiting for you, sweetheart."

His calls stop abruptly in mid-January. Her calls go unanswered until sometime in April when his phone service is disconnected.

**This is the end.**

"Mom?" Tate asks, a serious little adult in a twelve year old's body. "How come you didn't get married again?"

"Oh, sugar, I don't know," she sighs, running her hand over his hair. "It's a lot of work to go out looking for love, I guess. I'd rather spend my time with my little critter."

"You mean, it's my fault?" he asks lowly, and she realizes immediately how that must have sounded to a twelve-year-old.

"No, baby, not at all," she promises, straightening his shirt collar. "I know it doesn't seem like it sometimes, Tate, but once you love somebody, you always love them, you know? And once you find the person you love most, it's... hard to find someone else who measures up." She pats a hand against his cheek. "Your Daddy really knocked it out of the park, sweetie. It's more work than I want to do to try to find another star like him."

"Oh," Tate says, frowning thoughtfully. His hand snags hers as she stands to leave. "I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, Tater-Tot," she says, smiling. "Have a good day at school."

She gets into her car and begins her drive to work. Hundreds of miles away in Oregon, he's meeting with Ivan. They've started discussing what to do about the Murder Hut- excuse me, Mystery Shack now, isn't it? She has a shift at the hospital to begin. They're considering just cleansing the entire building, the mind of everyone who is involved with the building, and he's building a case to convince the rest of the Society that it needs to be done, even though he barely remembers why, he knows it must happen, he knows it's important.

And this won't do, either. Spectacles is too valuable to just destroy, but he needs to be... preoccupied until the portal can be completed.

Something immensely cold and calculating decides that he needs a distraction for a few years.

Something ancient and unloving reaches out with its finger.

The aneurism kills her before the oncoming city bus can, and by the time the tangle of metal and rubber has been unknotted there's nothing to recognize of the woman he's loved all his life.

_Well, I can't forget this evening_

_Or your face as you were leaving._

_But I guess that's just the way the story goes._

_You always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows._

_Yes, it shows._

**Author's Note:**

> FORMATTING IS VERY FRUSTRATING ON THIS SITE.  
> Edit: FORMATTING IS eXTREMELY FRUSTRATING ON THIS SITE RIGHT NOW.  
> THIS IS MY THIRD EDIT TO THE SUMMARY wow


End file.
